Security has been an increasingly dominant theme in the enterprise software chorus in recent months, and on Tuesday Salesforce added a new voice to the mix with Shield, a set of platform services designed to help companies build secure apps.

Designed as part of the Salesforce1 platform, Shield offers four security-minded components intended to make it easier for companies with regulatory, compliance or governance requirements to build cloud apps with built-in auditing, encryption, archiving and monitoring functions.

A platform encryption feature, for instance, means that companies can easily designate sensitive data to be encrypted while preserving key business capabilities and workflow. A health insurance company, say, could manage personally identifiable information (PII) and protected health information (PHI) without compromising its agents' ability to perform key functions using that data, such as searching claims, determining coverage eligibility and approving payments.

Event monitoring, meanwhile, gives IT organizations a way to see which users are logging into Salesforce along with what information they are accessing, from where, and through what channel. Financial management firms, for instance, could use the capability to determine whether their financial advisors are capturing the right client data in Salesforce and also when employees are downloading sensitive customer information unnecessarily, including pinpointing the exact time and location.

A data archive feature allows organizations to store long-lived business data in the Salesforce1 platform without compromising app performance or data availability.

Finally, Salesforce Shield's field audit trail component is designed to help businesses comply with industry regulations by tracking data changes at the field level for up to 10 years and setting different policies for each Salesforce object to ensure data is purged when it's no longer needed.

Salesforce Shield extends to all native Salesforce1 apps, including those created by the company's partners. It will be priced at a percentage of a customer's total Salesforce expenditures.

Salesforce Shield's four component services can be purchased together or individually. All of them are now available, with the exception of the data archive capability, which is due next year.

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